Factorial

when you work on cutting edge technologies and suddenly realize you are the front runner, it feels amazing.

last week opensocial was launched with google organising a group of social networking sites and vendors for a showdown against Facebook Apps.

I went through available commentary on blogs and documentation on OpenSocial.

opensocial, html/js based solution is still a very desktop(y) solution which google is targetting, widget style apps which can integrate with its google desktop and social networking applications, it does not offer the hosted app interactivity which facebook is offering.

I am pleased to find their proposed/developed system is very similar to what we(me and my team) have built for my client, I started planning on 3rd party Applications since last october(2006), but the implemention was developed during April to July 2007.

while we were developing Facebook apps was launched(24th May), I made a concious effort not to use facebook(and apps) and not get influenced in implementation and architecture.

There are some fundamental problems which you encounter developing a system with 3rd party apps. Facebook way of solution is superior to what opensocial is offering, but handling privacy and content access at a 1 to 1 level would be a big challenge. Only when they are able to offer it, these social platfoms will become SAAS marketplace and would be lucrative to developers and these networks themselves.

Though there are many others who are building or pledged to build Facebook, OpenSocial apps, we have built the application with a system which supports these integrations.

though our app is now nearly ready, but it is still not open to public, but I can say "Been there Done that"

So if you have really tough problems, talk to us( railsfactory@gmail.com ), hope we can get a simple implementable solution for you. We can do Facebook, OpenSocial integration for your Rails Apps(we are starting a Facebook integration for another client)